Cain's Curse: How Violence Shapes the World (Part 1)

Cain Leadeth Abel to Death.
Painting by  James Tissot.

In the biblical Book of Genesis, Cain was the first-born son of Adam and Eve, followed by Abel. One day, they both offered a sacrifice to please God. God accepted Abel's sacrifice while rejecting Cain's. Overcome by envy and anger, Cain leads his brother to the fields and there, overcome by jealousy and anger, he kills him. The first son of man is a murderer. History doomed to repeat itself; a sustained loop of tragedy and despair. Violence and hatred. Envy and murder. One could say we were made for this, if nothing else.

Cain, ashamed of his actions, wanders the Earth and builds a city, fathering a line of human descendants beginning with Enoch. Some interpretations of the biblical account consider him to be the originator of envy, anger and violence. It is no surprise then, that we are born of the same blood, craving the blood of our own. The sin of Cain immortalised.

In Robert Louis Stevenson's memorable novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the protagonist Dr Jekyll argues that humans possess a peculiar duality of nature, wherein our human side is in a state of perpetual struggle against the feral half. We are painfully aware of the fact that much of our lives are spent in an effort to mitigate the doings of our primitive self.

Shackled by societal norms and laws galore, we play the part of an ideal being, the beast within tugging away at the chains that bind it. What then, frees the beast that lurks within? What causes the monster to show itself in moments of emotional volatility? We'll take a look at these questions through the lens of rational reasoning.

I apologise for borrowing elements mythology and classic literature in an attempt to add some colour to the rather dull argument I am to present henceforth. However, I must admit that a dramatic representation of the matter does contribute positively to the present article.

Then, shunning all metaphorical ambiguity, we shall now move on to the physical origins of aggression. 

SCORN: Waking the Demon

Although love is showered upon with praises from the naive, perhaps no emotion has altered the course of human history as much as the thousand forms of human aggression. Hatred, envy, violence, oppression; all manifestations of a single form. However, I shall first be turning my attention to the most common form of aggression; the intent to harm another, the impulsive urge to inflict injury upon another in moments of passion.

When the bestial whims of a man are provoked, a certain impulse to cause harm arises almost autonomously, almost a reflex. The body fuming with rage, lips and limbs quivering; in these moments, one often loses control of their most valuable possession: their rational mind. The rap of a cane on a disobliging student's hand, the key scratch on your car door, the angry neighbour's trash in your backyard. How often have we returned from the clutches of anger to realise our own idiocy? The more superstitious among us would attribute such a loss of character to the devil. But what could be the most reasonable explanation for such an act?

The answer, not too surprising, is again: adrenaline. Adrenaline has evolved as a means to protect an organism from situations that involve an excess of external stimuli. Called the flight, fright or fight hormone, it causes the heartbeat to rise, blood vessels to dilate, and increases blood flow to the muscles. The resulting altered state of the body leads us into an emotive state of being. A heightened physical response to external stimuli makes for an asymmetry between cause and effect, leading us to act in a way that is not representative of us.

From an evolutionary perspective, the described response to an emotionally taxing situation does sound like an obvious advantage. A deer when faced with the roar of a lion, must either fight it, run away or cave in to fear. All responses managed by one little chemical surfing our nerve cells. Coming back to human society, someone who is known to have outbursts of a violent nature would be isolated and ostracised. The fact that anyone who is under the spell of anger cannot possibly maintain a human-like composure makes it all the more ugly in the eyes of reasonable fellow men.

However, I would like to propose that another form of aggression exists, infinitely more putrid than the one described here. Here, I'd like to introduce the terms micro-aggression and macro-aggression. What we have described so far are examples of micro-aggression.

In contrast, macro-aggression includes systematic acts of violence directed towards a different race, culture, gender, etc. While micro-aggression can be reasonably justified as an acting of losing oneself in a moment of passion, how could one possibly explain the countless acts of violence, systematically committed for generations in the name of race, religion or politics?

The unsuspected culprit behind the phenomenon will be unveiled in the next post, where I shall be commenting on the forms of macro-aggression while talking about how love and hate are both two sides of the same coin. In the meanwhile, if you have any comments and feedback, I'd be gladly willing to receive them.

And, oh! Merry Christmas! 

L*VE: A Necessary Evil?

Erastes (lover) and eromenos (beloved) kissing, ca. 480 BC.

It has all happened before. Butterflies flutter in the pit of your stomach. Flushed cheeks. Your pupils dilated, begging every ray of light to burn the image of your beloved onto every corner of your mind. You're in love. Or was that infatuation you felt? All the same, more of the same.

You've seen people come together, held by a string of habit and morbid dependence. Someone you held as a paragon of independence is reduced to an accessory, a trinket to be worn on their partner's arm. That one friend who scoffed at the idea of romance is now writing poetry. Inseparable. Dependent. Attached. Insufferable.

What forces bring about these ungodly changes in one's demeanour?

Students of philosophy have spent years attempting to understand love in its various forms. One of my favourite philosophical texts on the subject is "The Symposium" by Plato, which introduces Plato's "Ladder of Love". However, most of the text was muddled with metaphors laced with Greek mythology and romanticisation of Eros, the Greek God of Love. This does a great disservice to the attempt at truly understanding any human emotion.

To truly understand man, one must detach oneself from anything that could possibly muddle their rationality. In true sense, then, one must attempt to renounce any form of romanticism as a stepping stone to explaining the human condition. This is what I intend to do with the following text. Albeit a brief account, I hope that it shall help illuminate the subject with some clarity.

The Meeting
Humans are visual animals. Whether or not we accept this uncomfortable truth is another matter, entirely. Like most things in life that we desire, it is a prerequisite for our romantic partners to be aesthetically pleasing. At first, it may seem to be an evolutionary remnant, faithfully passed down through the generations like a family secret that slowly grows into common knowledge. Symmetrical faces are preferred over asymmetrical ones, slimmer body types are preferred over bulky ones, so on and so forth.

Based on our affinity towards visual characteristics, our mate-seeking rituals have evolved accordingly. Nightclubs, dance bars and parties; rendezvous points for those seeking romantic company, remind one of 'lek', where the male dances intoxicated, fluffing his proverbial feathers to get the bird. All this would seem rather primitive, if only we weren't habituated to it through constant reinforcement.

This is where we fall into our first trap. When we look at a "beautiful" face, our brain receives a dose of dopamine. Dopamine, commonly referred to as a 'feel-good' neurotransmitter, acts like a drug, reinforcing the mesolimbic pathway; turning you into a junkie craving the sight of your beloved. Soon, you are hooked into a chain of events that turn out to be rather regrettable. The late night calls, the hollow promises, the transparent excuses; we've all been there.

The Prosthetic Limb
Soon enough, you're taken over by another monster, more formidable than the previous one. Attachment.

You have an insatiable desire to remain in close proximity of your faithful beloved, counting the stars and picking names for your future children over warm cups of tea. 'But no,' you might say, 'I truly do love them'. It might seem so, for when we stumbled upon the discovery of love, we were profoundly ignorant of the puppet masters pulling our strings.

Oxytocin and vasopressin are hormones responsible for attachment in females and males, respectively. Secreted mostly during sexual activity and physical contact, it forms the basis of the emotional attachment that we experience and associate with the romantic. This strengthens the dating ritual to a point where both partners turn into a parasite, a prosthetic limb that takes the place of what we think is missing. And so, it goes on. Until the inevitable.

The Excision
Months, years and decades fly by. Picking apart the enigma you once admired is not what it seemed all those years ago. The romance fades, or rather, you crave the dopamine surge that you've been denied by habituating yourself to your partner. At that point, you come across someone who shows an interest in you. Those kind eyes, they seem to understand you. That smile, they seem to empathise with you. The countless chemicals tickling your brain, you reach out for the forbidden fruit.

And then, it happens. The excision. Countless moments of affection swept away by a tide of mindless infatuation and thrill-seeking. The cycle continues, leaving one or both the involved individuals in a state of anguish and despair. The constant cycle of agitation and relief strengthens the ties with their new partner, creating what appears to be a stronger bond between them. The limb has been excised, to be replaced by a newer, shinier one. Until it grows old with habit and cracks under the colossal weight of time.

However, there are exceptions. Some people stay, fearing the harsh chill of loneliness. Some stay out of sincerity, fearing sin or society; or both. But they are all a speck in the kaleidoscope called mankind. And they all deserve the comfort of a warm embrace, a sincere kiss. And so, we hold on. Convincing ourselves that it means something more than the flick of a switch. A ripple in the mind.

NOTE
Kindly accept my sincerest apologies for delaying the article for more than what would be a reasonable amount of time. I have been otherwise occupied with several undertakings which I choose not to disclose.

I have always been rather dismissive of romantic love, considering it to be a hobby for humans who cannot bear the brunt of solitude. I, however, do not wish to undermine your genuine feelings of affection towards the love of your life.

My next article would feature my reflections on the nature of aggression from a rational perspective. 

What is the half-life of an emotion?

"I think, therefore I am." 

With these words, Descartes summed up the nature of human existence. Whatever man is not, he is perhaps the only animal capable of abstract (and more rarely, rational) thought. Philosophers spent centuries trying to decipher the mysteries of the mind, before the era of scientific enlightenment pointed them in the right direction. The establishment of modern medicine lead to the discovery that what we consider to be the 'mind' or the innate 'soul', is nothing but the by-product of our neural processes. 

All you are is a thought, and your thoughts are nothing but a spark in the elaborate circuitry of your nervous system. These sparks, though not always, are at the mercy of the chemicals that bathe your brain. Everything you think, everything you feel. All of it can be boiled down to a set of neurons firing off in a set pattern. Reduced to chemicals released by the right gland at the right time. All your happiness and gloom, your misery and fortune, everything is born out of the cauldron of your neuro-endocrine system. 

In the past, emotions might have played a role in promoting group bonding and establishing social structure. What was once an essential tool for survival is now nothing more than a fossil, an evolutionary phantom limb that won't stop itching. Despite societal and cultural norms exaggerating the importance of these impractical remnants, one does realise (in due time, of course) that most emotions are ephemeral. 

No matter how much you loved your teenage sweetheart, you barely remember them once some time passes by. As the euphoria wears off, you realise that your feelings have atrophied and all that remains is the skeleton you lock away in the closet. Emotions are fleeting, and these fickle phantoms need to be exorcised (Mr Spock agrees). 

In an attempt to unveil the trickery behind these pesky pests that inevitably inhabit our skulls, I am going to write a series of blog posts revealing the biological processes that dictate our emotions. The intention is not to belittle what we feel, but rather produce a sense of comfort. 

The first emotion, of which we are all rather fond of, is the one I'll be tackling first in my next post. Love and attachment. In the meanwhile, I am open to suggestions and input regarding the same. 

P.S. This and the following posts do not seek to undermine what you may or may not feel. It is all a part and parcel of being human.

Can Your Lifestyle Affect Your Unborn Child? (Part 2)

This is the second of two articles on the subject. If you haven't read the first part, read it here.

Last time, we talked about Lamarckism and epigenetics, which will now help us answer the original question.

First, let us refresh our memory really quickly.

Lamarckism: The idea that organisms can pass on characteristics that it has acquired throughout its life.

Epigenetics: Change in expression of the genetic material (DNA), rather than a change in the coding sequence. 

Now, we'll combine the two ideas to reveal something that was discovered relatively recently.

Epigenetic Lamarckism.

Sounds kind of cool, right? But what is it? As the name suggests, epigenetic Lamarckism is the idea that epigenetic patterns that govern the expression of genes can be passed on from parent to offspring. As the expression of genes is related to the events in an organism's life, the inheritance of epigenetic patterns can be termed Lamarckian. Sounds like a neat little hypothesis, but is there any evidence-based research that supports the suggested form of Lamarckian inheritance?

Well, while it has not yet been experimentally demonstrated in humans, there is some evidence from rodent models. For example, a 2010 study showed that male rats that were fed a high-fat diet were more likely to have obese female offspring. Another study, published in 2013 showed that mice that were trained to fear the scent of a chemical, produced offspring that were as likely to be scared by the same scent. A study on birds shows that the circadian rhythm (the body's internal time-keeping system) of a mother can be epigenetically inherited by their offspring. Creepy?

So, should you be concerned? While trans-generational epigenetic inheritance hasn't been observed in humans, based on the evidence from model studies, it would be reasonable to assume that our lifestyle choices (what we eat, when we sleep) may affect our unborn kids.

The good news is that epigenetic inheritance is what we might call soft inheritance, which means that it is unstable and might revert to normal expression once the stimulus inducing it has been eliminated. Unlike hard inheritance, where the gene undergoes a permanent change in the form of a mutation.

However, there is some evidence to suggest that the predisposition to certain diseases could be epigenetically inherited by offspring in humans. So, we'd rather be careful not to pass on our habits to our children by maintaining a relatively healthy lifestyle. Stay healthy. Keep your unborn kids healthy. And yes, give my post a like.

Until next time! Bubye!

Can Your Lifestyle Affect Your Unborn Child? (Part 1)

This is the first of two articles on the subject, the second article will be posted on or before the 10th of June, 2017. 

Darwin's theory of natural selection provided us with a beautiful explanation for all the life we see around us. But not many of us know that there were other competing theories, that were ostensibly eliminated through natural selection. 

One of the most interesting theories of the origin of species was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist in 1809, almost half a decade before Darwin published his book 'On The Origin of Species'. Why then, couldn't Lamarckian theory survive the test of time? Well, while Lamarck may have been the first to suggest the theory of evolution, the process he described was very different from Darwin's gradualism. Lamarck's theory is what is now called the use-disuse theory. 

Simply, there are two ways to explain the long neck of a giraffe. A Lamarckian explanation would suggest that the ancestors of giraffes that stretched their necks to get to the foliage on higher trees would pass on the information to their unborn offspring, causing them to grow longer necks. While this does sound like a plausible theory, it would predict the appearance of newer forms of life in a much shorter span of time. That, as we know, is not the case. 

Why am I talking about hungry giraffes and theories of evolution? Am I not supposed to deal with the question in the title of this article? All in good time.

See, the crux of Lamarckism is that we are somehow able to pass on acquired characteristics to our offspring. For humans, this would imply that our lifestyle; the way we eat, sleep, etc would have an indirect effect on our future offspring. But considering that the theory has been abandoned, that's not true, right? Or, is it?

As mentioned in my previous article, genes work by encoding information which is then decoded by a pathway that is usually called the central dogma. Remember? DNA makes RNA makes Protein. Well, DNA does not literally make RNA (same for RNA and proteins), but you get the point. But if that's the case, and all the cells in our body have the same DNA, why doesn't your eyeball have hair? Any such questions can be answered with one word: Epigenetics.

If genes are our master puppeteers, epigenetics is what keeps those genes on a string. This is usually done by processes such as acetylation, methylation and differential condensation of the DNA and these processes may be interconnected in regulating the differential expression of these genes. These processes basically involve the addition of a methyl or acetyl (tiny molecules) tags that affect whether the DNA sequence is expressed as protein or not. 

Okay, you get that. But, what does it have to do with whether or not you can affect your unborn child with your lifestyle choices? That is a related and slightly more complicated issue, which I shall deal with entirely in the second part of this article. 

P.S. I have split the subject into two articles to make it less tedious for the reader. A really long article would cause the reader's interest in the subject to wane midway. Apologies for that. 

One Gene, One Behaviour?

Erwin Schrodinger, the brilliant Austrian physicist, is best known for his wave equation that describes the movement of particles on a quantum level. Perhaps among his lesser-known contributions is that he laid the foundations of quantum or molecular biology in his book 'What is life?'.

Schrodinger was one of the first to hypothesise regarding the nature of the hereditary material responsible for the way we are. He suggested that if such a molecule exists, it would most certainly be an aperiodic crystal. This implied the presence of a molecule that was able to hold information using an aperiodic sequence of molecules connected by covalent bonds (related to the information theory interpretation of entropy, a blog post for another day). Schrodinger (as did most scientists) assumed that the most likely candidate were proteins, being composed of 20 different monomers called amino acids.

This was proven wrong in a few decades, with the establishment of DNA as the puppeteer that held the strings to life. Francis and Crick were hailed as the pioneers of a new age for biology (Apologies, Rosalind Franklin). Methods were developed to find out how stuff works, which lead to what we call the central dogma. Simply put: DNA makes RNA makes Protein. All we are was reduced to a tightly regulated clockwork of molecules that we now call life.

Now, I assume that the reader has some knowledge of how DNA works, so I'm going to skip right to the good bit. Genes produce proteins through a dizzyingly complex process, and proteins keep us alive by keeping those (and many other) processes running. This was neatly summarised in Beadle and Tatum's one gene-one enzyme hypothesis, which said that each gene produces one enzyme that affects one step in a metabolic pathway. 

But that's a bit too simple, yes?

What I think about is, whether genes affect our behaviour? Yes, yes. Anyone would agree that they do.

But, could we extend the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis to a one gene-one behaviour hypothesis? I mean, could one gene somehow contribute to a complex action or behaviour, as we might call it? There's data to support this, but we have yet to uncover the subtle intricacies of the issue.

I recall an experiment that Professor Dawkins mentions in his book The Selfish Gene. W. C. Rothenbuhler, an entomologist interested in the behaviour of bees, found that a complex behaviour for maintaining beehive hygiene was controlled by genetics. Grubs are sometimes affected by a disease called foul brood. Some strains, called the hygienic strains, get rid of this problem by committing infanticide (GASP!). That includes: locating the infected grub, removing the wax cap from its cell and dragging the poor thing out and yanking it off the hive.

Now, one might conclude that this behaviour is genetically determined. True. However, what's astonishing is that this complex behaviour can be sub-divided into its elements, as can be seen above. Cross-breeding between hygienic and unhygienic strains produced hygienic as well as unhygienic strains. However, a third strain went half-way. While it plucked off the wax cap on the grub's cell, it did not get rid of the diseased grubs. Further cross-breeding proved that the behaviours for uncapping and throwing out were defined by two genes. How fascinating.

Could it be that our behaviours are defined by our genes? Truly, they are. But, could we ever be able to know how? Surely, it is far more complex to understand how a gene might affect synaptogenesis (creation of connections between neighbouring neurons in the brain) in a brain as complex as ours, producing a defined behaviour. And despite its many triumphs, neuroscience is surely in its infancy, for we know more about what's on our mind than within it.

Could we identify genes that define our behaviours? And if we do, could we in the future, engineer humans that have certain behaviours built into them? Surely, we talk about designer babies (back in the news again. Thanks, CRISPR!), but the arguments are mostly limited to physical attributes and eugenics (humans are so obsessed with aesthetics, aren't they?). A good way to search for such genotypes would be to dice human behaviours into their fundamentals, and then, look for a genotype corresponding to each of those behaviours.

Some questions that arise are: Suppose we find a genotype that predisposes a human being to be more aggressive or violent. Wouldn't that correlation lead, inevitably, to genetic screens that would seek to identify such behaviours based solely on their genes? Would that be ethical? How much control do we have over our genetic impulses? How guilty are we for our follies, if we are cursed to follow our genetic destiny? 

Laplace's Demon and the Question of Free Will

Pierre-Simon Laplace was a French mathematician and physicist born in the mid 18th century who made enormous contributions to the development of the natural sciences. But he also made contributions to modern philosophy with his idea of causal determinism. Closely related to predeterminism, Laplace's ideas were rooted in scientific thought. 

In A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Laplace argued for scientific determinism in the following words:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atoms; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

Sounds a lot like God, doesn't it? 

Simply, consider an atom; any atom, that is part of your body. Now, you go back in time, thousands, millions, and then billions of years. You watch that atom skip and jump through a series of events back to the singularity that resulted in the big bang. Now, press play. You see? Everything that has happened since is the result of a series of events that are a product of particles coming in contact with other particles in their vicinity. Thus, one might assume that knowing the position and quantum state of the particles in a space, their evolution in space-time is pre-determined. Neat.

Thinking about it, does this not negate the idea of free will? Does it not imply that everything we do is the result of a series of events that can be predicted based on the position and states of the particles that make us? It would require loads of computation, really. But since Laplace's demon can compute and predict the universe, we're possibly simple too. 

But there's one little problem. Werner Heisenberg, a brilliant theoretical physicist from Germany, introduced an idea called the 'Uncertainty Principle'. Simply put, the principle states that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be determined without disturbing the system when we observe it. The observer effect can be used to argue for the anthropic principle, but that's a story for another day.

Heisenberg's uncertainty seemed to yank the rug from under Laplace's Demon. Or did it?

Yes, quantum mechanics is fundamentally probabilistic and certainly uncertain. But, that has to do with the observer effect, right? What really goes on when we're not looking? Is there another set of rules that govern quantum particles when unobserved? We would never know. Does the Demon know of a way to observe the quantum particles without letting them know they're observed? We'll never know that, either.

Another stumbling rock in the Demon's path is what we call the Butterfly Effect, one of the central tenets of chaos theory. The smallest change in the initial state of a system will lead to an entirely different outcome. Tying in with the uncertainty, it sounds like the Demon has been exorcised for good.  Right? Although, I tend to differently.

What do I believe in? Well, belief is a strong word. But I do think that quantum particles behave entirely differently when unobserved, and if those laws are static, the universe is fundamentally predictable in its entirety. Simply, I am unsure whether we are ever in control of anything. I think time exists as a block, stretching from the big bang up to the end of the universe (if there is one). We merely exist to play our part in the play, living through the snapshots that make up time, snapshots that we call now.

Do you find the idea liberating? Knowing that whatever screw-ups you've had, were the result of a deterministic system? Or do you find it suffocating? Knowing that you're never in control. That you'll forever be a puppet in the hands of time and probability.